


The nature of affection

by orphan_account



Category: Ouran High School Host Club
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-09-02
Updated: 2006-09-02
Packaged: 2017-10-13 02:28:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/131821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Takashi first met Mitsukuni on an island in Okinawa. It was an island of white beaches, a wedding day of sun and blue sky.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	The nature of affection

Takashi first met Mitsukuni on an island in Okinawa. It was an island of white beaches, a wedding day of sun and blue sky. The daylight shone across bride and cameraman, and every mother present reached for her parasol, applied sunscreen to wriggling little bodies.

Takashi, who tanned easily, saw a boy standing at the edge of the water. Mitsukuni was the smallest person at the beach, other than the babies cradled in their parents’ arms. His skin was fair and a little burnt, his feet buried in dark, wet sand. As Takashi approached, he looked up and smiled.

They built sand-rabbits on the shore, and had just finished the fifth one when the photographer decided that little children were indispensable to the aesthetic of the photo shoot. Before their mothers pulled them apart, Takashi lifted his fingers and brushed the sand out of Mitsukuni’s hair.

They were three years old.

#

They were Takashi and Mitsukuni from the beginning, surnames hardly being practical with all the Morinozuka aunts and Haninozuka cousins around, and even when Mitsukuni showed a marked predilection for using the diminutive, it was never Taka-chan.

(It was not something they talked about; indeed, it was not something he thought about until years later when he took comfort in the fact that it was still Tama-chan, always Tama-chan.)

Mitsukuni was short and Takashi was tall; this also was true from their first day at kindergarten, where they learnt that most people in the world were neither tall nor short but a nondescript in-between. They spent the next twelve years of education at opposite ends of the classroom. Takashi practiced five-yard dashes everyday for six years, worried that he might not reach the front row in time if an emergency were to arise. After the incident in junior high when Mitsukuni fell asleep during English class, Takashi conceded that he was more likely to be _the_ danger than to be in danger.

Ouran was not a school that discriminated against the unusual, even the violently unusual. Mitsukuni grew up well-loved, and loved everybody in return, although it was a shallow, superficial kind of love: the love of someone who’d never had to sacrifice for the things he cared about.

(Takashi could hold these opinions with confidence because he knew everything about Mitsukuni, because fifteen years of training and watchfulness and picking up sandals leaves you with an indelible knowledge of a person’s soul. Mitsukuni was kind, essentially good-hearted; he was also selfish, and no degree of love or loyalty could blind Takashi to the fact.)

#

Takashi liked facts. Take, for instance: _La Paz is the capital city of Bolivia. There are ten kata in kendo. Mitsukuni likes cake and rabbits._ They were all facts, and Takashi loved them, and held an increasingly complicated and uncertain relationship with them.

Most of the complexity came from the awareness that facts were useful and important and beautiful, but they were not the most important thing in life. They were not even the most important thing in Morinozuka Takashi’s life. Things like Mitsukuni’s smile, the grip of a _shinai_ in one’s palm, the flavour of freshly caught sashimi - these things were not facts; they just were.

Morinozuka and Haninozuka was one of those things that was, and if anyone had ever asked Takashi why he loved Mitsukuni, he would not have answered, but simply thought to himself that he was Morinozuka, and that possessed its own logic and its own kind of sense. It was a logic different from the one that belonged to facts, and Takashi had learnt early on that facts were not necessary to logic.

Mitsukuni was the most logical person he knew, and Mitsukuni had a great propensity for ignoring the facts.

#

Suoh Tamaki did not live by any logical system, or at least not one that was known to Takashi. Even Mitsukuni, who was an expert at solving equations, did not quite understand him.

Tamaki-logic worked like this: Haninozuka Mitsukuni was less selfish and more loving when flaunting stuffed toys and consuming cake five times a day, than he was when being a leader of men, practising self-denial on a tatami mat.

Takashi noted these things but considered them secondary. What was important was that Mitsukuni was smiling. Perhaps it was the Morinozuka in him speaking. Takashi had always belonged completely to Haninozuka; love rendered him paralytic, caused Mitsukuni’s approval to be more important than Mitsukuni’s well-being.

He was reminded that just as there were different kinds of logic, there were also different kinds of love. Tamaki’s love spoke where Takashi’s was silent.

#

Mitsukuni was not Takashi’s special person; rather, he was the only person. So far.


End file.
